🐯 Ajay Kulkarni

Rolling into another day of the Primary Summit. Hit me up if we should connect onsite. Kudos to the Primary Ventures team so far, as yesterday’s Pre-Seed Summit was on point. Mar Hershenson, Benjamin Sun, Chris Douvos, Zach Weinberg, and Graham Pingree all dropping helpful nuggets for fund managers. Some paraphrased highlights: - Chris Douvos (AHOY Capital) - Most fund decks are terrible. Start with your people (not your strategy) and know you have about 6 slides of his attention. - Zach Weinberg (Curie.Bio ) - beleives SF’s AI talent is a significant advantage over NY, wouldn’t build AI in NY. Also questions if VC exits can keep up with VC expansion (generally hilarious and smart Twitter follow) - Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) - VC is so much more competitive now. It’s not enough to be an ex-founder with a great network and domain expertise. Have a better “why you are different” or do something else! - Benjamin Sun (Primary Venture Partners)- still sees arbitrage in going long NY venture (vs. SF). Do the work to keep various influential networking nodes aware of what you’re doing and how you think.

47

5 Comments

Product for Engineers dropped another awesome post recently: How we decide what to build. It’s a beautiful building-in-public look at how PostHog goes about product development. There is so much to learn from this newsletter. I love it. https://lnkd.in/ewNBSpu4

60

45 Comments

DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

24

1 Comment

During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

10

5 Comments

Some midweek wisdom from Y Combinator founder, Paul Graham, on why startups shouldn't stress over competitors. According to Graham, based on Y Combinator's extensive data set, few of their startups are actually killed by competitors. He compares the protection a startup has against competitors to the vastness of space, emphasising that the market is large enough for multiple players to thrive. Graham's analogy likens encountering a competitor to suddenly finding another runner in your race lane - the best course of action? “It’s sort of like if you’re running the hundred meters and suddenly a lane appears with another runner in it. What should you do? Run as fast as you can, just like you presumably were.” #Startups #Competition #Entrepreneurship #wearehiring

5

1 Comment

Learn a bit more about our DNA and how we operate at Acurio Ventures from Kate Cornell

23

1 Comment

Hiring mistakes are costly, especially for startups that work at speed, iterate, and need people who have that mindset and can execute at that pace. The product team and function are integral in the whole creation process and need to work in harmony with marketing, community, sales, and everyone else. In our next Wizly Amplify session, product veteran Jeremy Glassenberg will share case studies and stories of how he built and led teams at Box, Tradeshift, and DocuSign. He has managed and expanded communities of tens of thousands of developers, executed high-profile integrations promoted by Salesforce and Google, and led application marketplaces that were key to their companies' growth and retention. This session will dive into the dangers of poor hiring decisions and the critical behavioral traits that can make or break a company. You’ll also get a critique of common PM interview processes, uncovering why popular methods often fail and how adopting more rigorous, challenging approaches leads to better hires. See more here and apply to attend: https://lu.ma/zwnhxj2j

15

Strong Opinions Weakly Held #3: Me in 2017: Just make the investment to do it right the first time - save the headache and cost of all the rework! Me in 2021: Just get something out there for people to use. Something is better than nothing. Me in 2024: Typical engineer answer comes back again - it depends. Something is not always better than nothing. It can damage your brand and your standing in customers' eyes and it may be hard to get them to give you a second shot - not everyone understands the idea of "beta stage" and "MVP". But conversely, I've seen far too many projects toil and churn on "Can we actually release this yet? It doesn't have feature X Y Z." DON'T DO THAT. You don't know what customers want until they tell you. Often, they can't tell you until they get some piece of your direction in their minds. The goal is an MVP: Minimal viable product. The problem is: what constitutes minimal? what constitutes viable? and to an extent, what constitutes product? PS: If you want to learn more, come to my #STLStartupWeek talk, "How Not To Build Your MVP: An Engineer's Advice for Non-Technical Founders". Register here:

8

Did you know that 68% of small businesses report having cash flow problems, and many small businesses rely on the owner's personal funds to stay afloat? Relay exists to solve this and the best part is it's actually working! Which makes this announcement even sweeter: We raised a USD $32.2 million Series B round. What does this mean? - More spend management tools to improve financial visibility - More products to give small business owners flexibility - More integrations to streamline operations - And ultimately more businesses making better and smarter financial decisions Exciting times ahead! PS We're hiring: https://lnkd.in/gMT2mN25

34

1 Comment